Latest Release
- JUN 2, 2023
- 2 Songs
- The Stooges · 1969
- Funhouse (Deluxe Edition) [2005 Remaster] · 1970
- The Stooges (Deluxe Edition) · 1969
- The Stooges (Deluxe Edition) · 1969
- The Stooges (Deluxe Edition) · 1969
- Funhouse (Deluxe Edition) [2005 Remaster] · 1970
- Punk Needs YOU · 2009
- Funhouse · 1970
- Funhouse · 1970
- Funhouse (Deluxe Edition) [2005 Remaster] · 1970
Essential Albums
- 1970
- About a week after The Stooges put out their first album in August 1969, they played a show in Boston, opening for a feel-good blues-rock band called Ten Years After. It was so loud, so crude, so contrary to the pervasive optimism of the moment that nobody knew quite what to make of it. After all, Ten Years After had just come from playing Woodstock, and here were a bunch of creeps from the Midwest pushing out a wall of noise, their singer writhing on the ground, cutting himself. So, the audience—roughly 3,000 people—just sat in silence. About a decade later, when asked what he thought his legacy was, Iggy Pop said he wasn't sure, but he thinks he helped wipe out the ’60s. Even after the thousands of albums it helped inspire, The Stooges sounds mean. They’re bored (“1969”). They’re frustrated (“No Fun”). They’re so wild with lust, they hate themselves (“I Wanna Be Your Dog”). Whereas the rebellion of early rock ’n’ roll was fun and prosocial, The Stooges is inward and nihilistic, a perfect reflection of the reptilian poison lurking in the teenage id. They’d been inspired by the noisiness of The Velvet Underground, but in transposing that noise from New York to sleepy Ann Arbor, Michigan, it takes on an ominous cast: These are sweet neighborhood boys down in the rec room, and they’re going out of their minds. That sense of liberation is in the album’s honesty. Iggy felt that rock music had been co-opted by business interests—tamed, streamlined, and market-tested to the point that no new ground could be gained with it. It was a doubly sinister accusation at a moment when rock was being cast as a countercultural force. But in the absence of anything they could trust, The Stooges built their reality from the ground up.
Albums
Artist Playlists
- True forefathers of punk rock.
- Head-spinners sparked by the Midwestern legends.
- The sound of a bar brawl waiting to happen has simple origins.
Compilations
- 2005
More To Hear
- Celebrating the music of two massive game changers.
About The Stooges
There are many theories as to when the ’60s hippie dream ended, but certainly the arrival of The Stooges provided a doomy death knell. Formed in 1967, the Ann Arbor quartet—guitarist Ron Asheton, his drummer brother Scott, bassist Dave Alexander, and a freaky frontman who christened himself Iggy Pop—answered the era’s peace and love with nihilism and noise, investing the snarl of ’60s garage rock with a more sinister, apocalyptic aura. Produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, the band’s 1969 self-titled debut cast Iggy’s feral fantasies (“I Wanna Be Your Dog”) and anti-social mission statements (“No Fun”) in skull-splitting wah-wah guitars and rumbling caveman rhythms; the following year’s Fun House presented an even more fearsome collision of murderous acid rock and free-jazz fury. The commercial failure of those records nearly deep-sixed the group, before a retooled version of The Stooges—with Ron switching to bass to accommodate new guitarist James Williamson—emerged for 1973’s blistering Raw Power, produced by superfan David Bowie. That record also scared off the public, but it wouldn’t be long before the first generation of punks and alt-rockers elevated The Stooges from cult curio to eternally influential institution. Their legacy secure, Iggy and the Ashetons reunited in 2007 to release The Weirdness, which allowed The Stooges to play for the adoring festival crowds they were denied the first time around. Following Ron’s death in 2009, Williamson re-entered the fold for 2013’s Ready to Die, a surprisingly reflective effort that had the feel of a swan song—a fate sealed by the 2014 passing of Scott Asheton.
- ORIGIN
- Ann Arbor, MI, United States
- FORMED
- 1967
- GENRE
- Rock